Public Radio's Private Guru

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Published: November 11, 2001

DURING the final days of October, as the public radio station WAMU-FM in Washington launched an on-air fund drive, one particular group of former listeners began calling in to donate only their complaints. They were fans of a bluegrass show that had been dropped without warning four months earlier from its coveted slot during drive- time on weekday afternoons. Refusing to contribute money, demanding refunds of previous gifts, the protesters meant to deny WAMU its goal of raising $1 million. And this was only their latest piece of political theater.

In the preceding weeks, bluegrass loyalists had picketed two fund-raising events, one man carrying a sign declaring "WAMU = Fraud, Stupidity and Heartache." "Save Bluegrass" Web sites and e-mail lists had sprung up. Back before the terror attacks of Sept. 11 had consumed Congressional attention, Representative Howard Coble of North Carolina had taken to the floor of the House to declare, "Perhaps the WAMU management team needs to be introduced to the woodshed."

This sort of strife was not limited to Washington, either. Seven months earlier and 2,000 miles away, to the strains of Haydn's "Farewell" symphony, the public station KUER-FM in Salt Lake City ended 40 years of broadcasting classical music, bringing condemnation from the Utah legislature and the state's major newspapers. Meanwhile, in Maine, town meetings were being held to assail the state public radio system for dropping live broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. (They were ultimately restored.) And in Roanoke, Va., the United States District Court prepared to hear the case of the NPR station WVTF's former manager. He was suing university and state officials for $2 million for having fired him shortly after he dropped the Met broadcasts, which were restored over his objections.

All these controversies, seemingly so disparate, traced back to a common source. His name is David Giovannoni. A brilliant analyst of public radio's audience — who it is, how much it listens, when it listens, what it listens to, when and why it donates money — he is quite possibly the most influential figure in shaping the sound of National Public Radio today, the sound heard by upward of 20 million Americans weekly.

Mr. Giovannoni's company in suburban Washington, Audience Research Analysis, holds contracts with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, Public Radio International and almost every major NPR member station in the country. He essentially invented the language of public radio today, terms like "affinity," "loyalty," "power" and "public service." The phrase most public stations intone in their hourly ID's — "listener-supported" — grew out of Mr. Giovannoni's research. What might be considered the standard public- radio schedule, with its daylong emphasis on news and talk, largely subscribes to his findings. And during the years NPR has applied Mr. Giovannoni's findings, it has more than doubled listenership and gone from near bankruptcy to financial stability.

Every one of the radio stations involved in these recent battles acted largely on Mr. Giovannoni's research. His analysis showed them that, however vociferous the audience for bluegrass in Washington or symphonies in Salt Lake City or the Met in Virginia and Maine, those programs drove away a vast majority of the most loyal listeners and donors. The way to bring them and their checkbooks back was to schedule more of the news and information programs they craved.

As such, Mr. Giovannoni is the lightning rod for the intense, often bitter debate about what course NPR and its member stations should take in their evolution from a hodgepodge of "educational broadcasting" outlets dependent on the largess of universities and the federal government to a media powerhouse increasingly independent of the public sector. Depending on whom you ask, Mr. Giovannoni either helped save NPR by pointing the path to financial self-sufficiency or helped undermine the kind of programming that made it worth saving in the first place. "A visionary," says Richard Madden, the vice president of radio at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "A numbers Nazi," the independent producer Larry Josephson labeled him several years ago.

For all the heated language, the conflict shaking public radio is not the stereotypical struggle between aesthetes and philistines. When Mr. Giovannoni's clients dropped country and classical music, or consigned them to weekends and the after-midnight abyss, they didn't plug in Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern or easy listening; they put on the news and discussion programs that have earned NPR its accolades: "Fresh Air," "Talk of the Nation," "All Things Considered." NPR's superb coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, starting with round-the-clock reporting the first week, may have served as the ultimate confirmation of Mr. Giovannoni's thesis that news-information forms the most integral, essential, irreplaceable element of public radio.